The invention relates to delivering of messages and in particular to delivering of multimedia messages which are delivered by the so-called Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). A Multimedia Message (MM) can contain all kind of messages, like pictures, video clips, sounds, speech etc., or any arbitrary combination of these.
From a technical viewpoint, the MMS provides a non-realtime service which operates partly in a store-and-forward fashion. Multimedia messages are transmitted using an air interface (for example, a GPRS air interface, any Wireless LAN, UMTS etc.).
The multimedia messages can be sent from an identified user/application of a network (e.g., intranet) to a mobile station (MS), from the MS to the network (intranet or internet) or from the MS to another MS.
Furthermore, a network element providing important functions for the MMS is the so-called Multimedia Messaging Service Centre (MMSC). The MMSC contains a store-and-forward function which stores the multimedia messages in a database and tries to send them to the recipient mobile station (MS). For this, the MMSC is informed automatically when the MS has become reachable.
Multimedia messages usually have a validity period. The messages are removed from the database of the MMSC in which they are stored if they cannot be delivered to the MS during the validity period.
Regarding the delivery of the messages, the mobile terminated multimedia messages have two delivery options: The multimedia message is sent automatically to the recipient MS, or the recipient is informed of the arrived multimedia message using SMS, for example. The notification contains at least the message size and the message identification. Then, the user can explicitly request the network to the multimedia message to the MS. The choice between the delivery options can based on the message size or the message content type. For example, it can be set that messages less than 1000 kB are delivered automatically to the MS, or that text and voice messages are delivered automatically to the MS.
When sending messages, it is often not always useful to transmit a message to a recipient MS. For example, in case such a message contains tourist information concerning a particular town, it is not useful to send this message to a user, who has left this town.
This is in particular a problem in case the message is a multimedia message which is in general considerably large. Thus, if such a message is transmitted although it is not required, the corresponding network is affected to an undesirable heavy load.